Bulgaria’s caretaker government shuts ‘shop for people’ after Peevski’s project proves flop for people

Bulgaria’s caretaker Agriculture Minister Ivan Hristanov said on April 29 that he was ordering the state-owned “Shop for the People” shut down, describing its financial results as tragic and it not being the state’s business to run a commercial enterprise.

The “Shop for the People” project was approved by Parliament in March 2025 on the basis of legislation tabled by Magnitsky Act-sanctioned Delyan Peevski and in August, the government of the time approved the establishment of the company, with an initial capital of 10 million leva.

The purported idea of the state-owned company was to sell essential food products with a maximum markup of 10 per cent. Detractors denounced the project as a populist bid by Peevski to attract votes for his Movement for Rights and Freedoms party.

Soon it became clear that the “Shop for the People” project was making massive losses, while its directors were taking large salaries.

Caretaker Prime Minister Andrei Gyurov, speaking at the start of the April 29 meeting of the interim government, said: “Is there a scheme for empty shelves and full pockets?”

Gyurov said that Hristanov had reported to him that “there are no goods on the shelves, that the accounts are in the red, but the bosses are pampering themselves with thousands of euro in salaries, and today they ran away” – a reference to the announcement earlier in the day that the board of directors had resigned.

“This increasingly looks like a state-funded experiment in draining,” Gyurov said.

“In Bulgaria, we have already seen Magnitsky bankruptcies. And I want Minister Hristanov to say whether we are facing another one,” he said.

Bulgarian citizens do not pay taxes to finance “shops for people” and they do not pay to watch 10 million of state money flow away while the shelves stand empty, Gyurov said.

“This is not social policy, but another showcase of the failure of the model that was overthrown by protests,” he said.

(Photo: Frances Magee/ freeimages.com)